From the forest of Katyn in Russia to Charlottesville in Virginia, the legacy of a violent past is manifested in public upheavals and heated debates over history, memory, and justice. Among the most contested are those events that have been marked by repressive silence, denial, and historical erasure. When being reclaimed, they continuously reshape societal relations, shift memory politics, and reformulate historical representations. How can we understand this transformation? What kind of memory work needs to be done to overcome imposed forgetting? This course explores how societies, nations, and groups deal with the painful legacies of mass atrocities and genocides carried out by the 19th and 20th-century empires. Over the course of the semester, we will inquire into theories of, and approaches to, imperialism, history production, and politics of memory and apply them to major cases of mass atrocities and political violence, including slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples in North America, the Armenian genocide, lynching and race-based violence, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, the Rwanda genocide, and the Srebrenica massacre. By incorporating a diverse range of sources into a course material – from artworks and memoirs to atrocity files, we will further discuss the shifting politics of representations of mass violence, mnemonic activism, and the complexities of historical redress. This course serves as an introduction to the field of sociology of knowledge and memory studies.